Themed memoir anthologies are as oversubscribed as reality TV—and frequently as cheesy. But here's one that's as hard to avert your eyes from as a traffic accident: Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts (Plume), edited by Michael Taeckens.

Let's put one thing on the table up front, like we might an heirloom STD (unless you're the cowardly creep who drove Maud Newton to slam her front door over and over one Valentine's Day until the lock froze): This is not a pity party. No, in the essays carrying the biggest charge here, the authors anatomize their own complicity and duplicity. So Saïd Sayrafiezadeh tells how he followed the blond Ukrainian theater director of his dreams from Pittsburgh to Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, then led her on in her hopes of eventual childbearing. When he proved to be just one more spooked-off designated dad-to-be, she yelled, "I did it again," and then, as he prepared to leave, whispered the same words.

Until that final moment, though, as Jami Attenberg notes of her entanglement with another broke-ass, noncommittal writer, "You would not tolerate this behavior if you had just started dating someone, but because you have a past together, you think it is just part of your bigger story."

And then there's Kate Christensen's parting with the sleazy 36-year-old "chaperone" who lusted after her 15-year-old self, she all "heady with sexual power": "We said good-bye, and I went on my way with my newly big ass and zitty face, no longer Lolita, no longer powerful, no longer fascinating." Yeah, good-bye to all that—and good riddance!